How HTML5 can benefit SEO

Being a webmaster, I usually surf through various websites on daily basis. While doing the same, I have noticed a very interesting trend about the usability of HTML 5 in all across the web. Many popular websites like Youtube (using HTML 5 video player) are currently using this technology.

HTML5  provides great flexibility for web developers by enabling predefined tags, advance graphics and transitions without relying on third party browser plugins.

But let’s discuss how using HTML5 can benefit SEO industry?

In today’s SEO, webpage segmentation is one of the prime factor. It basically means dividing a page into several separate parts (i.e. main content, menus, headers, footers, links sections, etc.) and these parts are treated as separate entries. We know search engines are getting smatter day by day.  The way Google site-links segments common links, Bing shows few texts in webpage snapshots, there is no reason to believe they are using page segmentation. At present, there is no way for a Web master to tell search engines how to segment a page but this is bound to change in HTML 5.

Use of article tag:  HTML5 has a predefined “<article>” tag.  It allows separating online publication like blog, press releases or magazine from regular content. Not only it will make HTML cleaner but also search engine will put more importance on text inside this as compared to others if it is searching for fresh content.

Use of header tag: The “<header>” tag in HTML5 is the most important gift for SEO people. The <header> tag is very similar to the <H1> tag. But the difference is that it can contain a lots of things, such as H1, H2, H3 elements, whole paragraphs of text, hard-coded links (and this is really precious for SEO), and any other kind of info you feel relevant to include.

Use of footer and nav tag: Just like the previous tags <footer> and <nav> tags will let the search engine crawl bot to identify which is used for what purpose.

Displaying Ads: Many website owner has textual ads running over their websites. Using HTML5 the site owner can specify those areas to publishers where he/she is willing to have the ads, and where not.

The tags which i described here are just few. Apart from these there are many more that can effect SEO in some way or other. For instance, <audio>, <video>, <dialogue> etc. are those tags will make the content more appropriate and easily identifiable. Lastly, I would like to say that though HTML5 is in its primitive mode but, the day its put into use it will rule as a dominating standard for years.